Development of the Internet, during the past 30 years, development and widespread adoption of personal computers during the past 25 years, and development of the HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”) and web browsers, during the 1990's, has led to rapid development of the worldwide web. The worldwide web is a distributed repository of information encoded in HTML documents and various types of audio, video, graphical, application-specific, and other files, data, and executables referenced from HTML documents. HTML documents are accessed by users from hundreds of thousands of web-page servers distributed throughout the world and are rendered for graphical display as web pages by web browsers running on the users' computers. Development of the worldwide web has, in turn, spawned enormous commercial activity through on-line stores and trading communities and through development of powerful and enormously commercially successful information-acquisition tools, such as the Yahoo and Google search engines. Few technical advances have had greater and more immediate social and commercial impact.
The stunning success and rapid adoption of the worldwide web has also spawned a number of technological problems. Although the worldwide web is now a vast repository of millions of documents related to almost every possible topic, the information contained within the millions of HTML documents, and media files referenced from the HTML documents, is largely unstructured. Current search tools, including the Yahoo and Google search engines, provide keyword and key-symbol searches made possible by vast indexes of compiled word-and-symbol occurrences within web pages. These indexes are created and continuously supplemented by constant, automated access of web pages, parsing of the accessed web pages to extract words and symbols contained within the web pages, and creation of, and addition of data to, large, electronic databases that index the web pages by word and symbol occurrence. While keyword searches are powerful tools for finding information within the millions of HTML documents that reside within the worldwide web, keyword and key-symbol searching is typically imprecise. A keyword search often returns hundreds, thousands, or even greater numbers of undesired HTML documents and, at the same time, often fails to find large numbers of HTML documents that pertain to subject matter to which the keyword search is directed. Keyword searching may also be difficult to incorporate within other web-page browsing activities related to information acquisition from web pages.
These well-recognized and increasingly user-perceptible deficiencies in keyword searching have led to many different proposals for reorganizing the worldwide web and/or accessing information stored within the worldwide web. Certain of the proposals would require massive and fundamental changes to the current structure of, and information-encoding used in, the worldwide web. Others involve sophisticated machine-learning and semantic-knowledge-acquisition tools, practical implementations of which are not yet available. However, with the number of documents contained within the worldwide web increasing at an exponential rate, information-organization and information-access tools that lead to more immediate improvements in organizing and accessing information stored within the worldwide web are currently needed by worldwide web users, web-browser developers, and developers and vendors of myriad application programs, commercial electronic marketplaces, and other applications and venues that rely on information stored within the worldwide web.